Aspects are related generally to processing systems, and more specifically to driving pervasive commands using breakpoints in a hardware-accelerated simulation environment.
During the development cycle of a circuit, the functionality of the circuit may be analyzed using functional verification. Functional verification may be performed using a simulator, such as a Hardware Descriptive Language (HDL) simulator, which provides a software simulation of the behavior of the circuit. Additionally or alternatively, an acceleration platform, also referred to as an “accelerator” or a “hardware accelerator”, may be utilized to perform functional verification. As the accelerator is implemented in hardware, it is much faster than a software-based simulator. However, there is a reduced visibility to the value of each signal in the circuit design during the simulated execution by the accelerator with respect to a software-based simulator.
One use of the acceleration platform is to run post-silicon testing applications that once loaded to the system, continuously generate test cases, execute the test cases, and check the results. Initialization to support testing must be done at the proper time and when the design is in the proper state. Detecting when and how to do the initialization to efficiently execute a test sequence on the accelerator is a difficult challenge. For instance, the initialization may have to be done on incomplete designs that are unable to fully execute instructions.